Pre-Attentive Processing of Musical Information in the Human Brain

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Abstract
The present review summarizes a series of studies determining how complex auditory information is pre-attentively encoded in the human brain and how these pre-attentive brain functions differ between subjects with different performance levels during active discrimination task. The data indicate that the temporal structure of continuously presented stimulation is pre-attentively stored in the auditory cortex, this encoding being more accurate in subjects who perform better in a cognitive musicality test. However, no such group difference was observed when subjects with absolute pitch were compared with musicians without absolute pitch. The location of the neural trace within the auditory cortex was found to differ as a function of stimulus complexity (simple vs. complex) and its informational content (phoneme vs. chord). In sum, the data indicate that relatively complex stimulus features can be encoded at the pre-attentive level, and, further, that those facilitated pre-attentive brain functions may lead to superior attentive discrimination.

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